Book Preview – Why They Die: Civilian Devastation in Violent Conflict

After all the parades, the patriotic tributes, and the media portrayals that enshrine familiar virtues while maligning foreign vices, it is the weakest participants of armed conflict who bear its greatest burden. By any reasonable measure it is clear that civilians suffer most in large-scale violent conflicts. Violence against the innocent is not a secondary or passing consequence of war—it is deeply embedded in the character and evolution of today’s hostilities. In all too many armed conflicts raging across the globe, brutality to civilians caught up in the hostilities does not “just happen.” It is not merely occasional, nor is it circumstantial to some larger set of events.

In times of war, civilians tend to live strange lives. They can be uprooted from their homes, removed from their guardianship of their land, and treated like refugees in their own country. From the perspective of martial forces, warfare is not “theirs” to win or lose. Civilians are neither allies nor enemies, neither political leaders of the opposing forces nor their subordinates. From the perspective of international law, warfare is primarily an enterprise of combatants, for combatants, and with complicity of the combatants’ political institutions.  And the exclusion of civilians from military decision making magnifies civilians’ powerlessness.
In this work we show that the identity politics surrounding two groups—enemy combatants and civilian noncombatants living in the enemy camp—play a major role in the aggression against civilians. A common source of civilian devastation in armed conflict is found in the relationship between the militant Other and the non-militant members of the enemy population from the perspective of the ingroup combatants, that is, the relationship between the enemy combatants and the non-militant civilians.

We seek to explain why they die by bringing a novel perspective to conflict analysis.  We find dualistic models of conflict inadequate for our purposes, because such models fail to give primacy of place to the category of civilians. Probing beyond the binary framing of conflicts as existing solely between militant protagonist groups, we focus our analysis on the formative constructions of the two Others—militants and non-militants—from the perspective of the ingroup.  In the chapters below, we adopt a “grounded” approach that gives primacy of place to four case studies of civilian devastation: 
(a) structural violence against civilians in totalitarian regimes as illustrated by the deportation of Crimean Tatars in 1944 (Chapter 3); (b) the devastation of civilians in ethnic and religious conflicts, as illustrated by the Rwandan genocide in 1994 (Chapter 4); (c) and the killing of civilians in both the Second Lebanon War of 2006 (Chapter 5) and the Second Gulf War that began in 2002 (Chapter 6).

So, in times of war assumptions about who civilians are, what they do, and how they should be treated constitute a precondition of their endangerment, and represent the faceless form of domination that serves martial forces at the expense of civilians. We argue that each identity group engaged in conflict establishes a rationale for combat through its self-defined collective axiology. Collective axiology encapsulates a group’s sense of virtue and vice, right and wrong, and good and evil in relations with outsiders.   ■

For more information please contact the authors: Dr. Daniel Rothbart, [email protected], or Karina Korostelina, [email protected].